No cameras please

Helen Baxendale is feeling a bit fragile after spending the morning with a fag in her mouth. A lifelong nonsmoker, she's spending rehearsals puffing away as the cuckolded cook in Patrick Marber's Strindberg rejig After Miss Julie. And the false scent of herbal cigarettes has been banned: after all, this is the Donmar Warehouse. Acting gigs may get more lucrative, but they don't get more prestigious.

So Baxendale is pale but excited as she heads towards her first stage appearance since the string of TV work - Cardiac Arrest, Friends, Cold Feet - that made her famous.

It's a nice turnaround for a woman who, earlier this year, was reported to be quitting acting.

'Oh, that was complete bollocks,' chirps Baxendale, 34, in her Staffordshire accent. She's chatty and open, endearingly nervy about her return to the stage, but her tone hardens at the mention of the press. 'All I said,' she sighs, 'was that I didn't want to jump into a long-term series which takes up most of your life.'

She took the summer off, travelling round the world with her partner David Elliot and their kids - Nell, five, and Eric, two. After months away, it was hard to return to work. 'But after a while, your brain starts to go a bit squidgy,' she says. 'It's important to keep yourself taxed.'

Well, she's in luck here. Marber's play is a brisk, brutal update of Strindberg's Miss Julie that moves the action to General Election night, 1945.

First performed on BBC2 in 1995 - with Kathy Burke in Baxendale's role of Christine - it has a sexual candour reminiscent of Closer, Marber's hugely successful play. Tough stuff, in other words.

She's a supporting character, who plays it dead straight while Kelly Reilly and Coupling's Richard Coyte get hot and heavy as Miss Julie and John the chauffeur. After eight years away from the stage, Baxendale didn't want a starring role.

'It's a nice part,' she insists, 'but also I'm not carrying the show, which appealed to me. I'm not in the groove of doing plays. I've been offered parts in West End plays - leads! - but I think this is more interesting. I think I'll learn more from it. Maybe I'm bonkers. But this is like theatre royalty, isn't it? And I'm like some old Corrie star, compared.'

She worked at the Glasgow Citizens theatre in the mid-1990s - doing obscure European dramas, mostly. She loved the work, hated the first-night nerves. Then the TV work took off. 'There's a part of you, when you're offered a job on telly, you think, Oh, I'd better take that job or I'll never be offered anything again.'

Now, after starring in five increasingly well-rewarded seasons on Cold Feet, she can afford to be choosy: 'Yes, I'm bloody lucky.'

Doing this play has reminded her why she's an actress. And, after all the tabloid frenzy about her, she needed reminding. 'I hated all the press attention,' she says. 'It affected my life and it put me off my job. That's why I wanted to come and do this. I found the whole celebrity thing awful. Shallow, horrible, intrusive. I don't want it.

'Yes, I did earn more money than most people do, but that doesn't give people the right to follow you around. I may not earn any money for the rest of my life, so everybody else will catch up and hopefully they will leave me alone. That's an emotional issue, as you can see.'

She'd rather not do interviews, she says, though she recognises it's part of the business. 'But it saddens me to see people reading bulls**t the whole time,' she says. 'Reading about people whose lives have become boring, by being completely ostracised from the rest of the world.' She offers a mournful smile. 'Celebrity is nothing. It just makes you boring.'